The Queen’s Library Tea Room will host tea tastings, private events and more. (Photo courtesy The Queen’s Library Tea Room)
Tea has a long-established connection to civilized rituals. Tea drinking was, according to Confucius, the “li” or “ritual etiquette” that tamed and cultivated humans, allowing them to live in harmony with others. Our heads, hearts and souls may respond to rituals, religion and philosophy, but our bodies like a good, strong buzz.
Clarissa Luna and her husband, Daniel, plan on combining global tea rituals while energizing minds and bodies with caffeine when they open the doors of The Queen’s Library Tea Room on May 5. Located at 21 W. Main St., it will take over the space formerly known as Queen Bee & Co.
“The goal of our tea room is to really bring people together and to bring a little international flair to service,” Luna says. “Everywhere you travel, tea is the first thing you are offered in someone’s home.
“We plan on highlighting teas from Kenya, India, China — all the places where tea comes from, shifting the journey of tea to show how it’s harvested. Around the world, harvesting tea is a women’s collective. That is where the ‘library’ aspect will come in. We will highlight their stories.”
Both Lunas are leaders and student pastors at Life Church in Mechanicsville. Clarissa graduated from Liberty University with a bachelor’s degree in Christian counseling. She also is a co-founder at Impact Junkie, where Daniel, who is of Mexican descent, is a translator.
Impact Junkie was co-founded by Philip Harding, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and former senior advisor at the Pentagon and White House. Its mission is to take social entrepreneurship and combine it with “bleisure,” or business/leisure, travel — think Habitat for Humanity, but with people helping other people workshop their businesses and brands rather than build houses.
Impact Junkie is typically contracted by the U.S. State Department or American businesses. In 2019, the American Embassy in Belize hired the organization to lead an entrepreneurs’ fest in the country. During that seminar, the Lunas and Harding aided a local tiny-home business, revamping how electrical companies work in Belize and coaching another startup owner on how to grow her cosmetics business.
During “that trip,” Luna explains, “we were focused on presenting tourism projects in a more mindful way. Belize is well known as a tourist destination. During our workshop, we guided a lotion maker on how to make her products more story driven, connecting the creams and lotions to Belize and how they impact the country, rather than just presenting them as items to sell.”
Leah Coleman, president of the Richmond female business owner networking group Boss Babes RVA, traveled with Impact Junkie to Belize. It was Coleman who nudged the Lunas to buy Queen Bee & Co., an English tea room across the street from The Jefferson Hotel. In a leap of faith, the Lunas bought the business from Heather Marie Van Cleave, who decided to sell in order to focus on her health. Keeping “queen” in the name of the tea room is an homage to Van Cleave.
Upon opening, The Queen’s Library Tea Room will host a three-course, “English High Tea Experience” with teas imported from London’s Fortnum & Mason, a luxury department store and tea purveyor established in 1707. Reservations can currently be made online for the the hour-and-a-half-long tastings with a menu that will feature tea sandwiches including cucumber on sourdough, egg salad on mini croissants, pimento cheese on rye, and ham and cheese on a toasted potato roll, plus, of course, desserts.
The new owners are working to secure a full lineup of vendors for The Queen’s Library, which has no on-site kitchen. “We’re going to include more local products, rotating bakers each month to give them more exposure,” Luna says. “One baker we will definitely be using is Two and a Half Irishmen; their scones are the closest I’ve tasted to a classic English scone.”
The Lunas are also on the hunt for local florists and musicians to enliven the space. For Mother’s Day, a violinist will perform. Themed tea parties are in the works, as well as expanding private bookings beyond baby showers and book clubs, long a backbone of the cafe.
“Personally, we like travel and adventure and have a love of people,” Luna says. “We’re excited to grow our passions in Richmond … in more ways than one.”
